Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), have gained enormous popularity in the last decades thanks to their versatility and applicability in a vast range of fields, such as search and rescue, surveillance and patrolling, agriculture and civil monitoring and so on. Although their use as remote and unmanned sensors is still dominant, a recent trend is to conceive them as fully formed robots endowing them with the capability of touching, physically interacting, and manipulating the environment. This effort is aimed at realizing a fully developed aerial robotics field, in which the physical contact situation becomes an option to be exploited rather than a critical situation to be avoided.

In this talk I will give an overview of the recent results of my group, at LAAS-CNRS in the RIS team, regarding this new and rapidly growing field of robotics with a special attention to the mathematical models, control design and to the implementation of the designed controllers on real aerial robots with physically interactive capabilities. The presented models and methods have applications that range from tethered aerial landing, to inspection by contact with fully-actuated aerial platforms, passing through the cooperative manipulation with human in the loop and haptic feedback and the dynamic control of aerial robots with articulated arms.

Biography
Dr. Antonio Franchi
LAAS-CNRS, France
Antonio Franchi is a Permanent CNRS Researcher (CR1) at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse. From 2010 to 2013 he was a Research Scientist and then a Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany, and the scientific leader of the group ‘Autonomous Robotics and Human Machine Systems’. He received the Laurea degree (summa cum laude) in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Control and System Theory from the Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy. He was a visiting student with the University of California at Santa Barbara. His main research interests include autonomous systems and robotics, with a special regard to control, planning, estimation, human-machine systems, haptics, and hardware/software architectures. He published more than 70 papers in international journals and conferences and in 2010 he was awarded with the ‘IEEE RAS ICYA Best Paper Award’ for one of his works on Multi-robot Exploration. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine from 2013 to 2016, for the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine in 2015, and currently is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics . He is a co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Multi-Robot systems, which he co-founded in 2014.